


when the room is empty

by goukyorin (sashimisusie)



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Freeform, Gen, Minor canon divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 14:22:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5093954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie/pseuds/goukyorin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone understands that, on some fundamental level, a man with a bandage is in the middle of something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when the room is empty

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt - _Adronitis_ : Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.  
> With apologies to and inspiration from Richard Siken's Detail of the Fire.

A man with a bandage is in the middle of something.

Everyone–even a seven year old girl who thinks the best of the unnamed sounds in the shadows–understands this. On some fundamental level, somewhere akin to drawing in air and coaxing beats from knotted fibers, is the knowledge that the plaster is temporary. A stop-gap measure, the momentary disembarkation before resumption.

Open and shut, stop and go. He should have known better than to think the case so easily closed.

Naoto is gone, disappeared into the TV World for all their celebration about solving, and they are racing down fog-dense hallways once more. It doesn’t matter how far or fast you run when you’re always one, two, three steps behind. There is red under the neat half-moons of Souji’s nails, and purple mottling watercolour-thick down the pale knots of his spine. Everyone wants a battlefield and a chance to prove something–anything–wrong. People like to think that war means something. That the blood on your knuckles and red in your ledger will sort itself out somehow when that something comes along.

For what but blood separates the boys from men and the girls from women? Red. And a little more red. Everyone understands the man with the bandage, but the boy is another beast entirely.

Sometimes Souji isn’t even sure he knows himself. Maybe he’s never had to face his shadow because there’s never been anything to confront, the facets of who he is and who people think he is spread before him like sheets of coloured paper. There is infinite potential in a blank piece of paper and in a zero; what he is, what he needs to be, and what he can be existing in state of nothing and everything.

There is a certain quality to the brightness in Adachi’s gaze. Souji’s seen it before, the flicker of something moving too quick to name, in his own eyes when he wipes the steam from the bathroom mirror.

A flicker, a half-smile, and his heart skips a beat in his chest at the familiarity of it.

There must be a reason for the mirrored beast that raises its wary head when the detective takes a seat at the dinner table beside Souji. There’s meat on the platter–perfectly fried tonkatsu crisp atop the minced cabbage as per Nanako’s request–already cut and divided, but an itch lingering in his hands longs to strip flesh from bone.

But not in polite company. So he sits, chopsticks bared instead of nails, and waits until the room empties. Until his uncle tucks Nanako into bed and pulls his coat off the hook, until the door eases shut quietly so not to wake her. Work is eternal, but especially for the man hoping to quash his guilt with the pressure of it.

Accidents never happen when the room is empty. Everyone understands this just like everyone needs a place.

Things vanish. Vases break. People get thrown into televisions. Any number of things can happen in the absence of known facts to place. There are twenty-one sections marked out on the page of his year in Inaba, and try as he might to fit the Jester in, there's an incongruity that he still can't explain away.

The shot brushes the shell of his ear, the bullet burying to shatter the window behind him. Did Adachi miss on purpose, Souji wonders, pulse rushing loud to fill the silence on that side, or are they standing on the precipice of something else? Who will admit, without apology, what they've done to each other?

Tapping, quiet. He's stopped trying to listen for the specific cadence of footsteps over his heart.

"Do you get it now?" Adachi says, the gun barrel searing a ring against Souji's forehead where it rests. "We're done talking."

Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word. There are seeds sprouting up through the cracked windowpanes, and his carefully-tended garden needs no vipers. But he knows who his enemy is--he knows, somehow--and it isn't Adachi.

In his nostrils, the acrid scent of gunsmoke burning. On his cheek, the particular iron dampness of blood. Everyone understands the man with the bandage, but the boy?

 _He_ knows.


End file.
